At some point, something strange happens.
You go back to Italy and you recognise everything.
The sound of cups in a café. Conversations overlapping. The way people occupy space, ask for things, complain, move closer to one another. There are things the body recognises before you even have time to think about them.
And yet, after a few days, a feeling can arrive that is difficult to explain.
You are home.
But not completely.
I often hear this described in therapy by people who have lived abroad for many years. Sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes almost with embarrassment: “When I’m in London, I miss Italy. Then I go back to Italy and after a while I miss London. I don’t know where home is anymore.”
Perhaps because when we live somewhere else for a long time, it is not only the place we live in that changes.
We change too.
When living abroad changes the way we see ourselves
Leaving has a date.
We remember the first job, the first home, the effort of speaking another language, perhaps the loneliness of the first few months. At the beginning, the differences are obvious: we watch other people, learn the rules, compare everything.
Then something starts to become normal.
We stop translating in our heads. We learn different ways of working, making friends, respecting personal space, dealing with conflict. Some things that initially felt cold begin to feel like freedom; others that once seemed efficient start to feel distant.
We do not simply adapt to another culture.
We absorb parts of it.
And often we only realise how much when we return.
Research on intercultural identity describes exactly this possibility: living for a long time between different cultures can create a more complex sense of self, in which different forms of belonging coexist without necessarily merging into one simple identity.
Going back does not mean going backwards
There is an understandable fantasy in returning: the idea that by going back to the place we left, we might also recover a part of ourselves that stayed there.
But while we were away, people changed. Relationships found new balances. And most importantly, we changed.
Habits we once barely noticed can suddenly stand out. Ways of living we always thought of as natural begin to look cultural.
It is one of the strangest aspects of migration: sometimes we have to step outside a culture before we can really see it.
So returning can contain relief and irritation at the same time, familiarity and estrangement.
It does not necessarily mean we made the wrong choice.
Research on long-term return migration often refers to readjustment or reverse culture shock: we may need to adapt again even to the place we still call home.
The grief of the lives we cannot live at the same time
There is another, less visible part.
Living between two countries often means knowing that whichever choice we make, something will remain on the other side.
If we stay, we lose pieces of the everyday lives of the people we love. Parents grow older, nieces and nephews grow up, friends build lives we take part in only in fragments.
If we return, we may leave behind a kind of freedom, a profession, relationships, or a version of ourselves that had only become possible elsewhere.
This is why some decisions become so difficult.
We keep searching for the choice that involves no loss.
But perhaps that choice does not exist.
Sometimes the more painful question is not “Where would I be happier?”
It is:
“Which part of my life am I willing not to have, in order to have the other?”
And no list of pros and cons can really answer that.
Language changes something in us too
People who live for a long time in another language often describe a curious experience: they do not feel exactly like the same person in both languages.
Some things come more easily in Italian. Others feel easier to say in English.
Not because one version is false.
Each language carries relationships, contexts, memories and different ways of being in the world.
The language of childhood may carry a particular emotional density. The language learned as an adult may become the language of independence, work, and the life built away from home.
Perhaps this is why, when we work psychologically in one language or another, we are not simply translating words.
We are entering slightly different emotional landscapes.
Not fully belonging can also become a kind of freedom
When we talk about migration, we often focus on loss: nostalgia, loneliness, uprooting.
These experiences are real. But they are not the whole story.
Living between cultures can make what once seemed natural feel less obvious. We may become freer to choose which parts of the culture we come from we want to keep, and which no longer fit who we are.
We can take something from both worlds.
Sometimes this creates the feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere, a theme that also appears in research on cross-cultural identity. But that same position can become a privileged perspective: not being fully inside one culture can also allow us to see both of them from a slight distance.
Perhaps the difficulty begins when we keep demanding a pure sense of belonging from ourselves.
Am I still really Italian?
Is London my home, or just the place where I live?
If I go back, am I failing?
If I stay, am I leaving something behind?
As though we had to choose one definition capable of making everything orderly.
But perhaps some identities do not need to be resolved.
They need to be lived.
Perhaps “home” stops being only a place
In my work with people who live away from their country of origin, I often find it more useful not to rush towards an answer to the question “Where should I live?”
It can be more important first to understand what we mean by home.
Home can mean being close to family. A language we do not have to think about. The freedom to be spontaneous. A certain rhythm of life. The place where we feel professionally recognised. The people with whom we have built an everyday life. The place where we imagine raising our children.
And very rarely are all these things found in the same place.
Perhaps becoming an adult between two countries also means gradually letting go of the fantasy that one place should be able to contain everything.
Not in order to settle.
But in order to build a sense of belonging that is less geographical and more personal.
Which parts of me became possible here?
Which parts of myself do I feel I recover when I go back?
What would I not want to lose from either culture?
And above all: which life resembles more closely the person I have become, rather than only the person I was when I left?
Perhaps, after many years abroad, home is no longer exactly the place we come from.
And not simply the place we arrived in either.
It may become something we have built in between: made of languages, relationships, habits and pieces of different worlds.
A place that, before existing on a map, slowly began to exist inside us.